Traditional printing devices rely on a mechanically operated carriage to transport a print head in a linear direction as other mechanics advance a print medium in an orthogonal direction. As the print head moves over the print medium an image may be laid down. This systematic, translational movement of the print head and print medium allows for image data to be queued up in a predetermined and predictable manner. The print head may then advance over the print medium at a rate which allows all of the necessary ink to be deposited at each location. Once the print head has passed over a sufficient amount of the surface of the print medium to print the image in memory, the print job is complete.
While this memory allocation scheme may work well with traditional printers, the non-deterministic or random motion of handheld image deposition devices discourages the steady, consistent, and predictable advancement of the print head over the surface of the print medium. Consequently, alternative memory allocation schemes may be utilized to facilitate printing functionality. These alternative memory allocation schemes, however, pose new challenges in that they often include little information regarding the amount of ink required to fully describe a pixel. This may impact image quality.